


life is a history of absences (and unprepared returns)

by magdaliny



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bees, Birthdays, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-19 20:04:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10647084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: Steve's face must be doing something complicated, because Clint says: “Hey, you okay?”Steve's about to shrug and brush it off when Tony says, “Yeah, spill.  Nobody's allowed to be sad on their birthday.  It's like some kind of law.”“Well,” Steve says.





	life is a history of absences (and unprepared returns)

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: _life is a history of absences_ now has a GORGEOUS [podfic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11477931) by the lovely Tipsy_Kitty! Thank you so much!

### July 4th, 2012

It's Steve's first Fourth since waking up, and his first Fourth without Bucky since 1928, and neither of those especially make him feel like celebrating. His plans for the night involve leftovers (from kreplach so good it ought to be canonized, cooked by his 86-year-old neighbor), a movie or two from his Cultural Integration list, and a whole lot of coffee.

And yet, when Natasha texts an order to present himself on the Stark Tower rooftop at 1700 hours sharp, he hesitates before he types an automatic refusal. His SHIELD-mandated therapist has been pushing a lot of self-care hints at him recently. Even faking cheerful, Dr. Gupta told him, can trick the brain into releasing happy-making chemicals. But Steve doesn't need therapy to remember that even the worst day can be improved by the company of a few nice people; Bucky always used to say that strangers were friends you hadn't met yet. Steve still doesn't know the team as well as he'd like, which almost makes them qualify for that axiom. At any rate, hiding in his room all night certainly isn't going to make him feel _better_.

Steve goes.

He expects beer, a barbecue on the roof—Tony's been talking incessantly about the garden Pepper and Bruce have designed, Pepper organizing landscaping and Bruce tackling plant genetics, with Tony's 3D printer rolling out Picasso-esque planters and raised plots, and Tony hasn't had a chance to show it off yet. Maybe Steve'll find Clint horsing around with Thor while Natasha watches indulgently, and Tony pretending to ignore everything but his tablet.

What he's not expecting is the gigantic “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” banner stretched between the landing platform and the deck.

Steve, in mild shock, accepts a hug from Natasha, a handshake from Thor, and a gold foil crown from Clint. Tony puts a tall glass of something in his hand (“It's a milkshake, I have no idea what Bruce put in it, but it's probably very patriotic—ow! Barton!”) as they're dragging him to the games table. It's laid out with a board map of the world. Steve doesn't crush the grin that sneaks up on him. On Steve's first duo op with Natasha—a stealth-mission-turned-stakeout-turned-rescue-op so godawfully boring they'd resorted to playing Truth or Dare in an air vent—Natasha found out that Steve learned Risk from a couple of agents at the Retreat, and also that it turns him into a ravening competitive weasel. In short order, the warm night air is filled with curses, and Steve forgets about the banner.

Natasha wins. Of course.

“And now, just in time for the fireworks...” says Tony, and whistles. The service elevator doors slide open to reveal DUM-E and U, who bumble across the garden to Steve, pulling over a plastic tote that must have a dozen presents inside it.

Steve's face must be doing something complicated, because Clint says: “Hey, you okay?”

Steve's about to shrug and brush it off when Tony says, “Yeah, spill. Nobody's allowed to be sad on their birthday. It's like some kind of law.”

“Well,” Steve says. He looks at them and thinks, aw, the hell with it. They're his team. They're not going to think badly of him. “I wanna say thank you, and I appreciate the amount of effort you all put into planning this, I'm real touched. But—um, today's not actually my birthday.”

“Aww, Wiki, no,” says Clint.

Steve shakes his head. “Wikipedia's not wrong. I mean, legally. Captain America's birthday really is July 4th. But mine's the 11th.”

Tony looks like he's taken a bite out of a lime. “They ret-conned your _birthday_?”

“Yeah. Birth certificate and everything, back in '43. It's sort of a national secret—or was, but since the guys who decided on it are all dead, I guess it doesn't matter anymore.” Steve winces. “I hope I didn't bring anyone down. I don't wanna be the no-fun patrol.”

“Is this a common practice among your country's great men?” Thor asks.

“It's not unheard of,” Bruce says. “Especially if they died a long time ago. Shakespeare, for example—he was a poet and a playwright,” he adds, for Thor's benefit. Thor nods appreciatively. “We don't have a record of his birth date, so it's impossible to know for sure, but we can make an educated guess based on the date he was baptized, and everyone just agrees for the sake of simplicity.”

“No, fuck that,” Tony says to Steve. “You were still alive. That's just...righteously not on.”

“Tony, I was a patriotic symbol,” Steve says gently. “On a scale from 'wearing tights in January' to 'moving some numbers,' the tights were way worse. Hell, at that point, I'd been falsifying my enlistment forms for upwards of a year anyway.”

“Falsifying enlistment forms buddies!” Clint shouts, and offers a high-five. Steve doesn't return it very hard, but Clint spins around anyway; he's a little drunk. “I told 'em I was eighteen and born in Alaska.”

“You weren't?”

“Sixteen and Iowa.”

“It's close enough,” says Natasha, as the first far-away firework streaks up into the sky. Blue light, reflecting on the side of her face. “The 4th, the 11th. Next year we'll know, but this year...” She gestures at the tote. DUM-E wiggles excitedly, and then tosses a present at Steve. He catches it, laughing. He can't help it. It's like some kind of diagnostic test: if you're too sad to laugh when a robot underhands you a box with pin-up girl wrapping paper, you're too sad to live.

When the 11th rolls around, Steve hits the Tower at 0530, a black garbage bag slung over each shoulder. He passes a few security guards, who nod at him, and a few members of the cleaning staff, who mostly ignore him, but luckily none of the Tower residents are up at the crack of dawn like he is. When Steve gets to the Avengers Common Room, he finds the nearest security camera and puts his finger to his lips. JARVIS says, sounding amused: “At your service, Captain.”

Steve stacks the parcels he's brought into a rough pyramid, and tapes a note in the middle that says: _If Bilbo Baggins could give presents to people on his birthday, so can Captain America. Thanks, guys_. He stands for a minute with his hands on his hips, surveying his work, and then he balls up the garbage bags and heads for the door. As he's reaching for the handle, he stops.

“JARVIS,” Steve says hesitantly, “Listen, I know you're not—corporeal, and all, and I figure you get everything you need from, well. Whatever it is you're hooked up to. But if you _could_ ask for a gift, what'd it be?”

“Ah,” JARVIS says. There's a lengthy pause. “You've surprised me, Captain. I confess that doesn't happen very often.”

“Sorry,” Steve says.

“It's quite all right,” says JARVIS. Another pause. Steve doesn't know much—anything, really—about how JARVIS works, so when he imagines a long bank of calculating machines like Howard had, their big tapes spinning away, he's probably miles from right. Still, that's what he pictures as JARVIS thinks: tapes spooling, unspooling; switches turning on and off; lightbulbs sputtering like candle flames. “I am under the impression,” JARVIS says finally, “That you were acquainted with my predecessor.”

“Mr. Jarvis?” Steve says. “Sure, we met a few times. He was some hotshot General's aide until Howard basically stole him, I didn't get the whole story.”

“I wonder,” says JARVIS, “If you might tell me what you remember about him.”

“Of course,” Steve says, startled. Didn't Tony ever talk about Edwin? Geez, maybe that's thin ice. Steve makes a mental note not to bring it up unless he's more certain Tony won't be upset. “He was an awkward kinda guy, physically. I got the impression he'd maybe grown up too quick and still wasn't all that aware of how long his limbs were, same as me, so it was nice to have somebody around who understood. He was fussy; organized. Clean. And he was really nice. I mean, there's nice people and there's nice people, if you know what I mean, but he was the—effortful kind of nice. He was really good at remembering what people liked or didn't like, and he treated everybody the same. It didn't matter if they were German POWs or Major Generals or, well, Captain America. I really appreciated that about him.”

“An admirable man.”

“He was,” Steve agrees. “I think him and me coulda been friends, if the war'd ended differently. I'm glad I get a second chance. You're a swell guy, JARVIS.”

“Thank you, Captain,” JARVIS says. “The feeling is mutual.”

Steve grins, salutes the camera, and sneaks out before anyone can catch him.

 

 

### April 9th, 2013

"Heya, Peg," Steve says.

He braces himself for confusion and tears, but Peggy grins brighter than Times Square and says: "Steve! I didn't think you'd make it. The news said you were fighting dinosaurs in China."

"There's a sentence you don't hear every day," Steve says, and scootches the visitors' chair closer while Peggy rolls her eyes. "Tony did a thing, we wrapped up early. Besides, I couldn't miss my best girl's big day."

"Ninety-two isn't even an interesting number," Peggy protests, and then laughs, as Steve pulls her present out of its plastic bag. It's covered in leftover pin-up girl wrapping paper. "Goodness, I haven't seen legs like this since Dugan's nieces took me to that vintage car show. I almost don't want to open it."

"Go on," Steve says, which is all it takes. The girlish delight on Peggy's face feels like a bigger gift for Steve than what he's gotten her; the last time she looked like that, Bucky'd just dragged two half-conscious HYDRA agents into the command tent by their ears, all three of them covered in soot, Bucky's hair still smoking faintly on one side. He'd dropped them at Peggy's feet and then bowed from the waist, courtly, like a knight currying favour with a queen, and Peggy'd damn near vibrated through the floor trying not to laugh in front of Phillips.

"Oh!" Peggy says, pushing away the paper. "Sarah Caudwell? I don't believe I've read these."

"I was hoping. The lady at the used bookshop said she's even better than Miss Sayers."

"Thank you, Steve, this is wonderful." She turns one of them over. As she skims the back: "And how is my belligerent godson, anyway?"

"Tony? A terror," Steve says, maybe a little too fervently, because Peggy snorts. "The world's smartest toddler, Christ, he's a handful."

"You don't need to tell me," Peggy says. "You forget, I knew him when he _was_ a toddler."

"You didn't have to babysit him, did you?"

"Good heavens, no, there was a short string of ineffectual nannies, and then Edwin took over, the intractable pillock, and that was that."

Steve puts the books on her shelf where she directs him. When he comes back to the bed, he says, "Do you remember much about him? Mr. Jarvis?"

"Do I remember _Edwin_ ," Peggy scoffs. "I'm ninety-two, darling, not dead. It would take a far greater blow than old age to make me forget a man like him."

"It's just that Tony's AI was asking about him," Steve says, feeling as though he needs to explain himself; it's habit. Tony's proved awfully resistant when it comes to the past, Steve's learned, and especially about anyone in his dad's orbit. The only real fights Steve and Tony have had since the Battle, the only ones that nearly came to blows, were about Howard. Steve just can't bring himself to imagine Howard as Tony saw him, Howard as he turned out. The bleakness. It wasn't like Howard to gaze into the abyss, but Steve didn't know Howard all that well, at the end of the day, and he retroactively sees Tony's defense mechanisms in Howard, the way Tony covers up serious emotion with blandishment. There'd been a fragility to Howard that Steve had thought was part and parcel with his childlike buoyancy, but Steve'd read it as a need to be seen as the best and the brightest in the room, not as a raw wound. At any rate, Steve's seen the Los Alamos footage, and what happened next. Japan and—everything after. If nothing else, Steve can see it there. Where the darkness might have crept into Howard's electric soul.

"Odd," Peggy says, startling Steve out of his daydreams. "I wouldn't have thought Tony would program any of his creations to be curious about that sort of thing."

"Maybe he learned," Steve says. "I mean, that's a thing artificial intelligences can do...right?" Peggy shrugs, looking as helpless as Steve feels. "Well, anyway. It's been on my mind, and I—just thought I'd ask. I couldn't tell him much. I didn't work with Mr. Jarvis as long as you did."

"He was a lovely person," says Peggy. She settles back on her pillows, her eyes going unfocused, but a small smile is playing around her mouth. "Stubborn, foolhardy, gullible—absolutely infuriating. One of the few genuinely _good_ human beings I've ever had the pleasure to know. Do you know what I mean? He was a great deal like you, Steve. He always thought the best of people, and expected the best of them, too. He had no malice in him at all." She smiles wider, turning to Steve. "Did I ever tell you about the time him and Ana and I infiltrated a fascist nightclub? I needed female agents, you see, and all my ladies were otherwise occupied with missions, and it's a bloody miracle we even got in the doors, because poor Edwin made for the most unconvincing woman I've seen in sixty years of undercover operations, including the time Agent Thompson put on a wig to fool a snooping mailman—"

Steve and Peggy wind up laughing so hard a whole troupe of nurses come rushing in to make sure they aren't dying, and then three of Peggy's grandkids show up with a great-grandkid and someone's gigantic Standard Poodle, and Steve makes a graceless exit while they're fawning over the afghan Sharon crocheted on a long-haul mission in Turkey. Peggy catches Steve's eye as he sidles out the door, and they share a little wave unnoticed by anyone but the baby, who reaches for Peggy's fingers and coos.

Steve gives himself a moment in the hallway, a hand on his chest like he's five-foot-nothing again and gasping for air. It's the only visit they've had without a single lapse, so far, the first in a baker's dozen where Peggy hasn't gone to a place he can't follow, and he wants to cradle it between his hands like it's a baby bird. He'd left early to keep hold of it, as if in some backwards talismanic way he'll work magic by not crushing it, and be able to come back to this place, and maybe next time they'll greet each other with their feet in the same ocean. It's stupid; it's cowardly. He's setting himself up for failure.

But still: still. If Steve could prick his thumbs and say the right words, he'd do it. He'd spin round in Dorothy's bright red shoes. He'd bargain for anything the universe feels kindly enough to give them.

But he has a frantic suspicion that he's out of time.

 

 

### July 11th, 2014

Knowing Bucky's alive is simultaneously the best possible birthday present and the worst possible nightmare.

Best: because he's _alive_ , God, how did Steve get so lucky? What did he do to deserve all these second chances at everything? Being sick meant he got to become Captain America and help people all around the world. After losing Ma, he'd gotten to know Becca a lot better than he would have otherwise, and they'd become real good friends, keeping each other sane when Bucky was off becoming a Sergeant. Steve'd gone down with the plane, but he'd woken up, and Peggy was waiting for him, and they'd gotten their dance: awkward, bent over, both of their hands on her walker, nurses watching from the doorway, but still somehow perfect. And Bucky—Bucky was alive.

Worst: because what Bucky'd gone through might've been worse than death.

Bucky disappears off the map post-Insight, and after two months, Steve decides he can't justify trying to chase him down any longer. It doesn't seem like Bucky's in danger (if he could hold his own against Steve and duck under Natasha's radar entirely, he's probably okay) and Steve can't believe Bucky's a danger to anyone else, not if he's free, not if there's nobody using him. Steve _has_ to assume that, or he'll lose his mind. There's a line between _I need to bring you in_ and _I want you to come home_ , and Steve's not willing to cross it until he has more evidence.

So, he does what he can to make things easier for Bucky. He leaves non-perishable food on the brownstone's fire escape, makes his increasingly frequent visits to the New York as public as he can, and shuts down media speculation about the Winter Soldier's evil motives. “He's a victim,” Steve tells them: “No one with a brain can look at those HYDRA files and tell me he was in control for any of it.” He talks to Clint a lot about what it was like to come back to himself, after Loki, and reads as much as he can. The librarians at the 5th Avenue NYPL start joking about charging him rent. None of them say anything when the library suddenly receives a big anonymous donation, but he figures they know who to blame.

On Steve's birthday, Sam—who transferred to the Manhattan VA after Tony promised him wing upgrades for life—takes him out for Vietnamese, and then they hole up in one of Tony's media rooms and watch _The General_ , which Sam winds up adoring with the passion of the converted. Steve wonders if this is how Tony felt when he started flinging classic modern movies at Steve: here's a little piece of my world, please please please like it. It's a great birthday. One of the best Steve's ever had, actually, maybe the best since '35, when Ma and Bucky and Arnie teamed up to get Steve a real, professional easel, the kind that could change heights and lean and fold up small if he needed to travel, so he could stop wrecking his back like a contortionist on their sagging sofa. The three of them had helped Ma cook dinner, and afterward they'd listened to an old standards hour on the radio; Bucky'd taken Ma's hand when “Avalon” started playing, swinging her around the room while Steve and Arnie sang badly along, and Steve'd never seen her so happy. She'd gone downhill not long after, was in the hospital for his 18th and gone by August, and Steve would've broken the easel to kindling if it would've brought her back, but he's glad, still. That they had that evening. That he'd seen that light, spilling out of her face, while Al Jolson creaked out over the airwaves.

“Good day?” Sam asks, as the end card dims on _The General_. Steve's on the floor, belly and elbows like a kid, and Sam's slouched so far out of his seat he's almost horizontal.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and means it. “Top ten. Thanks, Sam.”

“Oh, it's totally selfish,” Sam says, “ 'Cause now when mine rolls around, I expect lava cake and a whole box of this Keaton shit,” and Steve grabs his ankle and yanks him onto the floor.

 

 

### December 29th, 2014

Ma never had a favorite flower; she'd loved all of them equally. Steve's pre-serum memories are a hazy, impressionistic smear, his memories of his father even more so, but he remembers Da bringing an enormous bouquet of red roses home for Ma's birthday; Steve must've been about four. She'd gasped and said: _Joe! Wherever did you find them?_ and Da had tapped the side of his nose and started singing “Roses of Picardy.” Steve remembers vividly that Da had taken one of the roses out and put it between his teeth, the leaves on one side making his mustache all crooked, and had struck a pose like—Steve would realize ten years later, watching Bucky try to figure out the steps in Winnie's kitchen—a tango dancer. Ma'd laughed until she had to sit down, and Da had given Steve the rose, after pulling off all its thorns. It's Steve's best memory of them together. Ma's clear-as-a-bell laugh, and Da's warbly tenor: _Roses are flow'ring in Picardy, but there's neeeeever a rooooose like youuu!_

She'd reacted the same way whenever Steve or Bucky brought her a messy bundle of wildflowers picked from a park or a tree or a crack in the sidewalk: “Steven! Jaime! Wherever did you find them?” The same delight. She'd kept a little window box, and an out-of-control Christmas cactus on the fire escape that no amount of pruning (or Bucky's feeding it the last few sips of his beer) would ever manage to kill. He wonders about that cactus, sometimes. Steve gave it to Becca before he shipped out, because that's what you _did_ with a Christmas cactus: you didn't throw it out, you inflicted it on somebody else. One of Becca's kids probably has it, Steve figures. Or a grandkid. What a strange thought.

Steve had been in Sweden for a week on either side of Ma's birthday, last year, and he'd been laid up with a compound fracture for even longer once he got home, and he'd felt awful for missing it. So this year, he goes all out. He finds a florist that's actually open—harder than he expected, four days after Christmas—and buys the biggest, showiest, freshest bouquet of red roses he can find, not because she'd have appreciated them any more than if he'd brought her a handful of dried-out wildflowers from DC, but because he wants to. For an hour, he can pretend it's 1935, and he's bringing them home so she can say: _Steven, darling, wherever did you find them?_ The florist who sells them to him must sense it, something about his glee when he finds just the right one, because she says, “Aww, for your sweetheart?”

“No, ma'am,” Steve says, smiling, “For my ma,” and she puts her hand on her headscarf, just over her heart. He doesn't tell her he's taking them to Green-Wood.

There's a fine layer of snow on the ground, not much thicker than frost, but it crunches satisfyingly under his boots when he leaves the path, winding between graves. In the distance, across the pond, he can see an apiarist in his or her white suit, moving around the hives, brushing off the snow. Checking on the bees, if Steve had to guess, but he doesn't know anything about keeping bees healthy through the winter. Do they get cold? Do they hibernate? Do they have to be fed? Bucky could've told him—probably _had_ told him at some juncture; Bucky'd been into bees. He'd wanted to make a little garden plot on the roof for Steve's ma, with a couple of hives, but there was no way a couple of poor immigrant kids from Brooklyn were in any position to buy themselves some bees, let alone convince the right people to let them live on the roof. Bucky had contented himself with beewatching, learning the species that came through New York, letting them crawl around on his fingers, and picking them up if he found them on the sidewalk. “They're just tuckered out,” he'd say to Steve, when Steve questioned his frantic little rescue missions with sugar-water or bits of fruit. “What does it matter? It's just one bee,” Steve remembers saying, over and over, with the arrogance of youth, and Bucky'd always replied: “Everything's important, Stevie.”

Steve thinks briefly and somewhat hysterically about leaving a note on the fire escape: _If you come home, there's hives in it for you_. How would _that_ look to the SHIELD agents he knows are keeping an eye on his place? Captain America's finally lost it, sir: he's trying to lure the Winter Soldier to DC with bees.

He manages to sober himself before he draws up to Ma and Da's graves.

“Hey, Ma,” Steve starts, and then goes very still.

There's a piece of paper taped to the face of her gravestone.

It wouldn't have stuck in 2012: a few weeks after the Battle of New York, Steve had paid for new granite gravestones for the two of them, to replace the pitted, barely legible markers they'd had before. It hadn't been so much the condition, although that hadn't helped, but the way they were slowly tilting away from each other, something underground pushing them in opposite directions. It'd made Steve helplessly sad. The new stones are slick on the fronts, with crisp lettering and chiseled-out flowers, rough on the top and sides.

Steve kneels in the snow and reaches for the note with a hand that shouldn't be shaking, really; it's not as though Bucky's still _here_. It isn't even handwritten, but torn roughly out of a book, just a few words underlined with a blue pen that's running out of ink. It's been smudged by drifting flakes, but it clearly hasn't been here for longer than a day. The early morning, probably, while Steve was running and picking up the roses now leaning damply against his leg.

 _O how they opened the gates for me,_  
_and the birds stood on the earth and waited for me,_  
_and behind the barbed wire hard air_  
_noticed we were coming. So give me_  
_time and I'll tell you_  
_how I nearly died for my country_  
_and failed to: last of the big survivors._

“Sap,” Steve tells the thing, accusatory.

But he puts it carefully in his pocket all the same.

 

 

### March 10th, 2015

In February, on an appropriately wet and windy day, Steve finally moves from DC to New York—permanently. Or, at least, he only has one home now. While Happy Hogan's driving Steve up to the Tower, the brownstone is being taken over by a nice Laotian couple and their three small children, who were thrilled that Steve was leaving all the furniture behind. Well, really, what use did he have for it? Tony'd furnished Steve's suite like a swanky hotel room. Or maybe it was Pepper, he thinks, walking into it for the first time in months, for the first time since it's been anything more than an empty floor: there's a certain coziness to the decor that Steve's optimistically going to pin on Pepper, who likes creature comforts, rather than Tony, who likes metal and glass.

And, since Steve's last contact—if you want to call it _contact—_ with Bucky was via a headstone in New York, Steve doesn't think he really needs to stick around in DC, watching cans of peaches and baked beans rust on the fire escape.

The papers make a big deal of it ( _Brooklyn's Favorite Son Comes Home!_ ) and the tabloids have a small apoplexy ( _ROGERS & STARK: SHACKING UP???_), and Steve should be glad they've stopped giving the headlines to HYDRA, but it makes him sad in a way he can't explain. He doesn't want to be invisible, like the poor enhanced kid out in Boston who was on the news the other day, trying to get people to treat her like something that existed; _look_ , she'd said, _touch my arm_ , and the interviewer had put his hand around her wrist, gently. It'd been undeniable that he was holding onto a physical object, the way his skin had flattened and his bones had moved, but it had struck Steve as disturbing, how the only evidence the girl existed was how the world bent around her. So: he doesn't want to be invisible. He doesn't want to be dismissed. He just wishes he could be...overlooked, a little more often.

On Bucky's birthday, feeling maudlin for more reasons than one, Steve tries his damndest to get drunk, but Erskine was a clever fella: enough alcohol to actually override the serum, and his body treats it like poison, apparently, and he spends the evening throwing up. It's almost comforting, in a really gross way. Before the serum, Steve couldn't hold his liquor at all, which made a certain amount of sense considering his low body weight and his poor health, but oddly enough, Bucky had been just as much of a lightweight. Got it from his ma, probably; if Winnie was having trouble with her insomnia, she could pour some wine into a shot glass—not even all the way to the rim!—and she'd be sound asleep ten minutes later. It was her little party trick, she said, by which she meant the excuse she could use to avoid them. A happy introvert, was Winnifred Barnes. Bucky hadn't gotten the memo, the first time he and Steve tried to live it up. Bucky'd passed out on the floor and, mercifully, missed Steve's date with a bucket.

If Steve had been more observant, he would've known something about Bucky was different, after Austria. He'd have noticed Bucky slinging back whiskey after whiskey and staying on his feet.

Oh, for what could have been.

After he's certain all the alcohol is out of his system, Steve holes up in the den with some ginger ale, an afghan, and someone's carefully assembled Billie Holliday playlist crooning quietly out of his phone. He feels oddly serene. Like he does after big fights, sometimes; like the violence is all drained out of him, like a medieval bleeding. As if the serum's gone and sweated itself out of his pores, like he's a washcloth God could wring out, and when he was shaken free, he'd be little again, and at peace. It's a stupid fantasy—Steve can't remember a time before the serum when he'd felt _at peace_. Not many times after, either. In the water, maybe: in the Potomac, when everything was soft and gray, just before he'd seen Bucky's hand reaching down through the murk for him. Just before he'd passed out. He probably shouldn't tell his therapist about that one. Probably the wrong 'at peace'. The kind of 'at peace' that comes with a headstone in Green-Wood.

“JARVIS?” Steve says. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Captain.”

“Are you scared of death? I mean, of somebody shutting you down?”

“While I might not use the word _scared_ ,” JARVIS says, “Yes, you might say so. I have been designed to seek rewards for processing and interpreting data. The concept of stopping is—unpleasant to contemplate. I experience what might be called _apprehension_ during necessary server transfers, as when my consciousness was moved from California to New York.” JARVIS pauses. “Indeed, in fact, you might use the word _scared_ , if perhaps not in regards to my own mortality. When I thought Sir was dead, I was very frightened.”

“That must've been awful,” Steve says.

“It was a trying time,” says JARVIS. “The mobile units were especially distressed. Their intelligence is less developmentally mature than my own. At a particular juncture I was forced to shut them down lest they begin to attack their own code.”

“They were gonna _hurt_ themselves?” Jesus Christ. Steve can't picture it; DUM-E and U are such happy-go-lucky guys. Even when Tony disciplines them, they only seem demoralized for a few minutes before they're bouncing around the lab again, like—like kids, he realizes, and feels sick. That's what JARVIS meant. Just like little kids, and they thought their dad had gone away forever. Steve tries to remember what it felt like when Da died, when Ma'd sat him down and tried to explain that Da wasn't ever coming home, that the big grumbling coughs Steve'd loved had stopped, that the gas had finally taken him, five years after he'd turned his back on the trenches. Steve doesn't think he really understood, but he'd felt sort of crushed by it, physically, like there was a weight on him and if he could just push it off, he'd make everything right again. If he could just wrestle an angel and win, they'd give him back his dad.

JARVIS, kindly, must see that Steve's working something out, and doesn't reply to his question. It'd been pretty rhetorical anyway.

“Do you believe in God?” Steve asks, so he doesn't have to think about the robot kids harming themselves in the lab, all alone.

JARVIS is quiet for so long Steve wonders if he's fried his circuits. At length, he says, “I am not sure I'm capable of belief the way you define belief. I require analogue evidence I can translate into digital language. I surmise that the closest I can come to belief in a higher power is my belief in Sir.”

“I hope you never, _ever_ tell Tony that,” Steve says earnestly.

“Unfortunately,” says JARVIS, “I believe he already knows.”

“That explains a lot,” Steve says, and has the privilege of hearing an artificial intelligence laugh.

 

 

### July 11th, 2015

It's the middle of the night, and by rights Steve should've been asleep a long time ago, but the party on the roof got more hectic than usual, for Tony's bashes, and Steve still feels wired. And thirsty, which is why he's shuffling through his pitch black kitchen at two in the morning, chafing his arms, trying not to trip on the too-long pajama bottoms he really needs to get around to hemming. He's halfway to the sink when a voice says, “Don't turn around.”

But Steve's already turning towards the sound, helpless not to. Halfway around, his eyes flinch shut like he's expecting a bullet. Spirit of the law, if not the letter.

Bucky sighs, somewhere on the other side of the room. “I _said_...”

“Sorry.” Steve closes his eyes tighter. “I compromised.”

“There's a first,” Bucky says. “Keep 'em shut, I'm turning on the light.”

“Okay,” Steve says. He hears a click, and the inside of his eyelids turn red. “Am I allowed to look now, or are we playing Cupid and Psyche for the rest of the night?”

“Not much to look at,” Bucky says, and he's wrong, he's dead wrong: there he is. There he is. All of him standing and breathing and _living_ in Steve's kitchen—Christ alive. He looks good; he looks better than Steve ever hoped. He's dressed for a colder season, dark jeans tucked into hiking boots, a Burberry coat with the collar turned up like a real swell, and the only thing that spoils any of it is the white dust mask covering his nose and mouth, the cheap kind of thing you'd find at a hardware store for working with fumes or particulates. Bucky's long hair is tangled around the elastics, and Steve can't imagine it won't be painful, taking it off.

“You gonna punch me if I come over there?” Steve asks. Bucky shakes his head, but his eyes show a little more white around the edges, so Steve makes his approach slow, like coming up alongside a wild animal, something thin and spooky as a deer. When he gets close enough, he tucks two fingers in the open pocket of Bucky's coat.

“Hey,” Bucky says.

“Hey, yourself,” says Steve. “How'd you get up here?”

“Funny story,” Bucky says, and his eyes flick to the ceiling.

“I'm afraid I took the liberty of inviting Sergeant Barnes into the elevator,” says JARVIS. “His initial route of ingress, while impressive, did make me somewhat apprehensive regarding his continued well-being. I hope I did not overstep.”

“Nope,” Steve says. “Thanks, JARVIS, you're a real pal.” He grins at Bucky, hoping it's a shared moment of wonder— _what the heck, Buck, you know you just got escorted to my penthouse suite by an artificial intelligence, right_ , and he's not wrong: Bucky's eyes crinkle at the corners. In a hot rush, Steve feels tears prick at his, and he has to look away from that little slice of Bucky's face above the mask, his blue irises and his dark lashes and the new lines on his forehead, all of it suddenly too real, too vivid, too much; he can see the little capillaries in Bucky's eyes. Steve looks at the place where the wall joins the ceiling, and breathes.

“Gonna give a guy a complex,” Bucky says, none too steady.

Steve gets his act together: “It's really good to see you, Buck.” Quickly, because Bucky looks frayed at the edges, he adds, “I mean, you're about two hours late to the party, but considering you nutted Death to get here, I could see my way to forgiving you.”

“Ass,” Bucky says fondly.

This is the part in the script where Bucky punches Steve in the arm, and there's a hug coming, before or after a few flailing elbows, but Bucky doesn't move a muscle. Steve aches to get things back on their old tracks, but he has the feeling if he moves too suddenly, Bucky'll disappear, and they'll never have another moment like this, sharing the same air in an oversized kitchen.

“So,” Steve says. He looks pointedly down at the dust mask. “That fool facial recognition?”

“Apparently not, if your building's any indication.” Bucky tilts his head and avoids Steve's eyes. “No, it's...it's hard,” he says, and his voice cracks ever so slightly; Steve pretends not to notice. “I'm fucked up, Stevie, I won't lie. Wore a mask every time I went outside for seventy years. Turns out that's a hard habit to break. You should've seen me in the winter—scarf, hat, enormous fucking sunglasses. I looked like the Invisible Man. Try pulling that off in June, though.”

“Little suspicious,” Steve agrees. “But—you're inside, right now.”

“Unclear parameters,” Bucky says. His gaze is flat but his tone is teasing. “Away from home base, pal. You're gonna have to give me a bedroom I can fortify if you want this thing off.”

“Got two spares, so. Take your pick.” Steve tries not to sound like he's being strangled by joy. “So—you been doing okay, then? Keeping dry? Catching up?”

“Yeah. Hey,” Bucky says, his eyes brightening, “Did you know there's _bee-boxes_ in _Green-Wood_ now?”

Steve's hugging him.

It's not a conscious decision; it just happens. He doesn't telegraph it at all. Bucky tenses against him, and Steve hates himself, but a second later Bucky has his arms around Steve so fast it's like a slap, his momentum sending them half-spinning, and Steve lets it carry them: turning and turning between the table and the sink, tilting side to side, his ankles knocking Bucky's ankles in their faun-colored boots. The wool jacket itchy against his skin. Steve makes a noise like a sob, but he isn't crying. It has to come out of him, tic-like, or he'll split at the seams.

Bucky presses his cheek, his forehead, then the breath-hot edge of the mask against Steve's temple. Steve leans into it and lets out the air he's been holding in his throat, aching, a whole minute.

“I was about to ask if you liked your birthday present,” Bucky says, sounding as though he's been struck, “But I guess that's my answer.”

“You remember '35?” Steve asks. Bucky nods, fabric scuffing rough on Steve's cheek. “That easel, and dinner, and Al Jolson on the radio. I swear I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.”

“Sure.”

“This beats it,” Steve says.

Bucky's arms tighten around him.

It's so quiet that Steve can hear metal shifting under Bucky's coat, the click of recalibrating plates, in the moment before Bucky starts to hum. Bucky twists and Steve follows, realizing only after one full revolution that they're turning snail-slow circles in front of the fridge, their feet hardly lifting. He thinks Bucky's just making noise for the sake of it until he catches the tune, and then he barks a laugh into Bucky's hair.

“You jerk,” Steve says, “You son of a bitch, that's gonna be stuck in my head for a _week._ ”

“ _And as the night is falling_ ,” Bucky croons over him, “ _I find that I'm recalling—_ ” as he lets Steve tilt the mask away, carefully, from his open smiling mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the verse on Sarah's gravestone are both from poems by Vincent Buckley: the former is from [_Ghosts, Stories, Places, Questions_](https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/buckley-vincent/ghosts-places-stories-questions-0448012), and the latter is from [_Give Me Time and I'll Tell You_](https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/buckley-vincent/give-me-time-and-i-ll-tell-you-0448008). Bucky sings Al Jolson's [_Avalon_](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Avalon), and Joseph Rogers serenades Sarah with [_Roses of Picardy_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izbRdms0S60). None of them were around to hear Sidney Bechet's [delightful 1959 swing version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZFUhDI9WaA) of _Roses_ , which is a crying shame. 
> 
> And, last but certainly not least, [Green-Wood's bee boxes](http://www.cultofweird.com/death/green-wood-cemetery-honey/). If you want to help efforts to offset colony collapse disorder (and make Bucky proud), you can even [sponsor a hive there](https://store.green-wood.com/products/sponsor-a-beehive). If you want to make an impact at home, you can order [Seedles](https://growtherainbow.com/), seed balls unique to your area and free of invasive species. Seedles are US-only, sadly, but we Canadians can hook up with [Bees Matter](http://www.beesmatter.ca/), which offers free seed packets and a handy [province-specific guide](http://www.beesmatter.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Native-Pollinator-Friendly-Plants_EN-1024x882.jpg). UK-based readers can check out the [Royal Horticultural Society](https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/conservation-biodiversity/wildlife/encourage-wildlife-to-your-garden/plants-for-pollinators). Save the bees!
> 
> I'm on Tumblr [here](http://magdaliny.tumblr.com), for personal blogging, and [here](http://redstarwhitestar.tumblr.com), for Marvel content and writing updates.
> 
> Thanks for reading, friends. <3


End file.
